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I have real sympathy for the developer of Apollo; at the same time it was such a huge and obvious risk to stake your entire business on the whims of another tha

I have real sympathy for the developer of Apollo; at the same time it was such a huge and obvious risk to stake your entire business on the whims of another that I find it difficult to be 100% sympathetic. It's like, I know this funded company that's doing a lot of work using intel SGX, if intel kill it, about 80 people lose the jobs and several million in VC goes up in smoke. It's insane to me that people are building businesses that can be killed by 3rd parties that they have no hope of influencing, and have no contracts with. Another chapter of the internet drama concludes, I suppose. I wish them all the best and I'll be curious to see if reddit survives.

tremon 3y ago
it was such a huge and obvious risk to stake your entire business on the whims of another How is this different than any other business running (part of) their operations at a large cloud provider? Or a business having to renew their contract with the power company?
- cyberpunk 3y ago
  You can change cloud and energy provider, Apollo can't change reddit provider. ?
- Alupis 3y ago
  > How is this different than any other business running (part of) their operations at a large cloud provider? You pay for your cloud provider...
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    If they were already paying, do you think that would have prevented a huge price hike with similar effect?
    - Alupis 3y ago
      Probably, for two reasons. First being Reddit wouldn't have suddenly needed to stop supporting 3rd party apps for free - apps that only cost Reddit money and generate no income. If the API made Reddit money, instead of costing them money, there would be no need for a sudden change. The "suddenness" of this change is due, in no small part, to the cost of supporting basically free-loading 3rd party apps that consume resources but offer nothing in exchange. Secondly, Apollo would have formed a business model that supported paying for API access, be it monthly subscriptions, freemium, etc. The current model of pay-once-use-forever is simply unsustainable (on an obvious level) - and the $12.99 annual subscription equally so. The Apollo model, as it was, required free API access. Even if Apollo had been paying for API access all along, and Reddit decided to suddenly hike the prices - Apollo would have been in a better position to raise their own prices accordingly, and would have had a userbase more accepting of paying. Paying for API access also compels the business to be more efficient in their calls. As it was, there was little-to-no incentive to operate large content caching on your own servers/services, etc. I have seen, but do not know their credibility, that Apollo was not very efficient in it's API calls and essentially hammered the API far more than was necessary. If you're not paying for it, why would you bother designing a more efficient system? The API fees were inevitable. More are coming - be sure of that, as corporations tighten their figurative belts and look for ways to stop bleeding money.
      - Dylan16807 3y ago
        The 12.99/yr model could have been perfectly sustainable. Why not? And the "hammering" is addressed and strongly countered in the article.
        Alupis 3y ago
        The new thread, with the backend dump indicates it polled reddit every 6 seconds per user for new messages. Maybe it's necessary, but that seems awfully tight timing. I have not reviewed any of the rest. My understanding is they tried to emulate push notifications... $12.99 per year was priced with majority of the compute burden foisted upon Reddit. Apollo had servers too, but apparently took a lot of steps to minimize what they did in order to keep subscription prices super low. $12.99 doesn't pay for an the free users that might not be hammering the API quite on the same level as the paid users, but hammered it non the less.

tremon 3y ago

it was such a huge and obvious risk to stake your entire business on the whims of another How is this different than any other business running (part of) their operations at a large cloud provider? Or a business having to renew their contract with the power company?

cyberpunk 3y ago
You can change cloud and energy provider, Apollo can't change reddit provider. ?
Alupis 3y ago
> How is this different than any other business running (part of) their operations at a large cloud provider? You pay for your cloud provider...
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  If they were already paying, do you think that would have prevented a huge price hike with similar effect?
  - Alupis 3y ago
    Probably, for two reasons. First being Reddit wouldn't have suddenly needed to stop supporting 3rd party apps for free - apps that only cost Reddit money and generate no income. If the API made Reddit money, instead of costing them money, there would be no need for a sudden change. The "suddenness" of this change is due, in no small part, to the cost of supporting basically free-loading 3rd party apps that consume resources but offer nothing in exchange. Secondly, Apollo would have formed a business model that supported paying for API access, be it monthly subscriptions, freemium, etc. The current model of pay-once-use-forever is simply unsustainable (on an obvious level) - and the $12.99 annual subscription equally so. The Apollo model, as it was, required free API access. Even if Apollo had been paying for API access all along, and Reddit decided to suddenly hike the prices - Apollo would have been in a better position to raise their own prices accordingly, and would have had a userbase more accepting of paying. Paying for API access also compels the business to be more efficient in their calls. As it was, there was little-to-no incentive to operate large content caching on your own servers/services, etc. I have seen, but do not know their credibility, that Apollo was not very efficient in it's API calls and essentially hammered the API far more than was necessary. If you're not paying for it, why would you bother designing a more efficient system? The API fees were inevitable. More are coming - be sure of that, as corporations tighten their figurative belts and look for ways to stop bleeding money.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      The 12.99/yr model could have been perfectly sustainable. Why not? And the "hammering" is addressed and strongly countered in the article.
      - Alupis 3y ago
        The new thread, with the backend dump indicates it polled reddit every 6 seconds per user for new messages. Maybe it's necessary, but that seems awfully tight timing. I have not reviewed any of the rest. My understanding is they tried to emulate push notifications... $12.99 per year was priced with majority of the compute burden foisted upon Reddit. Apollo had servers too, but apparently took a lot of steps to minimize what they did in order to keep subscription prices super low. $12.99 doesn't pay for an the free users that might not be hammering the API quite on the same level as the paid users, but hammered it non the less.